Page 84 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
Iris is quiet for a minute. “I don’t think so.”
“Would you get in trouble? I’m in a rough position here, kid. I don’t want to get you or Hector in trouble, but I’m friends with your mother.”
“We don’t really get in trouble. We get lectured.” Iris sighs, but trudges upstairs. Half an hour later she comes back down. “They don’t like it, but they say it’s better than going out and getting pregnant like my cousin did when she was my age.”
That’s almost exactly what Susan’s parents said when she dropped out of college to play the guitar in coffeehouses.
Patrick looks at the cover, the spiky flower, the hand-lettered title, the modest little “25c” in the top right corner. “I’ll pay you twenty cents each, wholesale,” he says.
“Do you mean it?”
“It’s good business,” he says, thinking of the rack of zines at Gem Spa and at the other places he’s glimpsed them.
But mostly, he remembers how annoyed Nathaniel said John was to see the zines. Other people will be annoyed, too. And other people won’t be. There’s some value in letting people know what kind of place this is.
* * *
By the end of September, Nathaniel is down to working ten hours a week in the shop, less than even Iris. He and Susan haveplayed two more gigs and they spend half their time hammering out the details of the record.
They’re acting in a way that feels, to Patrick, about eighty percent of the way to normal. If Patrick hadn’t seen the way they were that spring and summer, he wouldn’t have guessed that something was off. It doesn’t even look like Susan is upset—Susan’s never been able to hide that. She usually doesn’t even bother. It’s more like a mutual uneasiness.
Tonight, Nathaniel and Susan are fiddling with matchsticks, sliding them under the violin strings to change the sound. Eleanor is on the floor next to Patrick, trying to crawl. She’s rocking herself back and forth on her hands and knees, occasionally looking angrily at the floor and then her hands, like they must be defective.
Before Eleanor, he never understood what people were going on about when they said that babies looked like a parent or some other relation. Babies mostly look like babies. But when Eleanor gets that expression, she looks just like Susan. The rest of the time, she’s all Michael.
Looking at Eleanor and seeing Micheal isn’t desperately sad anymore—or, it is sad, and it probably always will be, but it’s also something else. She’s all he has of Michael, and he might be all she’ll ever have of her father, and at some point those two truths solidified into something good. They’re family.
“Another couple of days,” Nathaniel says from the sofa.
“She’ll be all over the shop,” Susan agrees. They all grin at one another, like they’ve personally accomplished something here.
Eleanor starts to cry, a sign that it’s bedtime. Patrick changes her and gets her a bottle, then puts her in her crib, fast asleep. Six months ago, he couldn’t have guessed it would ever be so simple to get this child to sleep.
Back in the living room, Nathaniel moves to the edge of the couch closest to Susan, and Patrick takes the invitation to sit. He takes the joint Susan passes him and lets their conversation wash over him.
“I think we should try drums on this track,” Nathaniel says.
“I can’t play the drums,” Susan says.
“Neither can I. But we can get a session musician.”
Susan’s quiet for a while. “I prefer that it’s only you and me.”
“Okay,” Nathaniel says, and starts to talk about something else. Fifths or eighths or some other fraction that matters in music, Patrick doesn’t know.
“Go back to the drums,” Susan says a few minutes later. “Tell me why you want them.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“If it wasn’t important, you wouldn’t have mentioned it. And now I’m curious.”
“I think drums—or really any percussion—would lay down the rhythm in a way that makes it less…pretty. Right now it’s beautiful. And that’s good, obviously. Nobody’s complaining about a beautiful song. But I think the anger is getting lost in the prettiness.”
Susan’s quiet again.
“You wrote the lyrics,” Nathaniel goes on. “You know they’re angry. I’d want people to hear that. If they walked away from that song thinking it wasniceI’d be annoyed. RememberGuernica?” They’d been to the Museum of Modern Art that summer. At the time Patrick thought it was a pretty questionable choice for Susan to want to sit on a bench in front of a twenty-five-foot-wide painting full of dismembered bodies, even if it is a Picasso and the bodies are basically just distressing shapes. “Guernicahas drums. Do you see what I mean?”
Patrick is just high enough forGuernica has drumsto be the most profound thing he’s heard in his life, even if he doesn’tunderstand what it means. “Guernicahas drums,” he whispers, amazed.
